Comparison of two SiGe 2-stage E-band Power Amplifier Architectures

• This paper presents simulation and measurement results for two 2-stage E-band power amplifiers implemented in 0.18um SiGe technology with fT = 200 GHz. To increase the power gain by mitigating the effect of the base-collector capacitance, the first design uses a differential cascode topology with a 2.7 V supply voltage. The second design instead uses capacitive cross-coupling of a differential common emitter stage, previously not demonstrated in mm-wave SiGe PAs, and has a supply voltage of only 1.5V. Low supply voltage is advantageous since a common supply can then be shared between the transceiver and the PA. To maximize the power gain and robustness, both designs use a transformer based interstage matching. The cascode design achieves a measured power gain, S21 , of 16 dB at 92 GHz with 17GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a simulated saturated output power, Psat , of 17 dBm with a 16% peak PAE. The cross-coupled design achieves a measured S21 of 10 dB at 93 GHz with 16 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a simulated Psat, of 15 dBm with 16% peak PAE. Comparing the measured and simulated results for the two amplifier architectures, the cascode topology is more robust, while the cross-coupled topology would benefit from a programmable cross-coupling capacitance.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

PA

E-band

SiGe

PA

E-band

SiGe

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kon (ämneskategori)

ref (ämneskategori)